if you could get away with spending £350 to £425 and getting a decent music laptop. You need something with a decent processor like a centrino (not a celeron), at least 1gig of ram (preferably 2), and at least a 5400rpm hard drive. If it uses a shared graphics card memory you will need more RAM to compensate.

Also you need to budget for a soundcard as others have said which is at least £130-150 for a decent one. I recommend the EMU 1616M which runs off of USB2 connection and sounds very good.

Do remember that the world of laptop recording also involves optimising the laptop to avoid getting glitches in your recording. There are articles online about optimisation but they involve disabling certain background programs/anti virus, and also setting processor priorities etc. Even with all the best optimisation and a decent soundcard you can still get problems with pops and crackles which involve a bit of research and headache to track down the cause of.

Don't want to put you off, as you shouldbe fine, remember that laptops allow you to do so much more than an 8 track editing wise, but they are also not designed for solely music, so you can have probs like driver conflicts and viruses that cause problems in your recording. I hear that MACs are a lot better for recording than PC laptops. I have a PC laptop and after a few probs along the way I am pretty stable with it. I hear of probs with MACS too, but if you solely want to record that may be a better option.